If we could perceive all the conditions, outward and inward, and take them into account, a distinct line of causation would become apparent. We should find disease no more an accident than the storm that breaks upon the seaboard or the volcanic flames that burst from the mountain top. The extreme complexity and delicacy of biological phenomena precludes a wide grasp of conditions in individual cases, but scientific investigation has established the point that of the antecedents to disease the largest proportion is some heritage of weakness transmitted from parents—some disabilities for healthy life resulting from a bad descent.
When, for instance, mental anxiety produced by adverse circumstances is said to have made a man mad, there is implied some inherent infirmity of nervous element which has co-operated. “Were the nervous system in a state of perfect soundness and in possession of that reserve power which it then has of adapting itself, within certain limits, to the varying external conditions, it is probable,” says Maudsley, “that the most unfavourable circumstances would not disturb permanently the relation and initiate mental disease. But when unfavourable action from without conspires with an infirmity of nature within, then the conditions of disorder are established and a discord or madness is produced.” (The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, p. 199.)
Thus although outward circumstances often decide the character of a disease, inherited infirmity is its primary cause. A being liable to madness, if subjected to anxiety, may, under different conditions, acquire not madness but consumption. A child may fall a victim to the special ailment from which one or both parents suffered; but equally it is possible that disease in him may assume a totally different form. All that can be affirmed with certainty is this: of diseased parents the offspring invariably inherit a constitution liable to “some kind of morbid degeneration, or a constitution destitute of that reserve power necessary to meet the trying occasions of life!”
The trying occasions of life have multiplied with every new complexity in social structure; and there has been no corresponding increase of constitutional strength; but, on the contrary, a growing feebleness of physique and instability of nerve-function. “Our children in these times,” remarks Dr. Richardson, “are our reproach. Where is there a healthy child? You may put before me a child showing to the unskilled mind no trace of disease.... It is sure to have some inherited failure. We are as yet unacquainted with all the phenomena of disease that pass in the hereditary line.... We admit, as proved, scrofula or struma, cancer, consumption, epilepsy, rheumatism, gout. It would be wrong to limit the hereditary proclivities of disease to this list. The further my own observations extend, the stronger is the impression made on my mind that the majority of the phenomena of disease have hereditariness of character.” (Diseases of Modern Life, p. 38.) Sir James Paget and Sir William Jenner gave evidence of a similar kind before a Committee of the House of Lords in 1882. From the former eminent physician’s speech I may quote one passage: “We now know that certain diseases of the lungs, liver and spleen are all of syphilitic origin, and the mortality from syphilis in its later forms is every year found to be larger and larger, by its being found to be the source of a number of diseases which previously were referred to other origins.” (The Times Report, August 11th, 1882.)
In August Bebel’s work on Woman, her Position in the Past, Present and Future, this passage occurs: “With regard to the decimating effects of venereal disease, we will only mention that in England between 1857 and 1865 the authenticated cases which ended fatally amounted to over 12,000, among which no fewer than 69 per cent. were children under twelve months, the victims of parental infection.” (p. 101.)
Of the original source from which syphilis sprang, of its implication in the sex problem, and of the ultimate eradication of its virus—to be attained only by the true solution of the sex problem—we cannot here speak; the point under immediate consideration is the fact that the civilized races of mankind persist in propagating and perpetuating disease. They unscrupulously bring into the world individual organisms that are pre-destined to failure because not endowed with the potential qualities indispensable to complete and successful life.
In America the same conditions are noted and publicly referred to. Mr. Nathan Allen, M.D., before a medical society at Massachusetts, reported: “A gradual change is taking place in the organization of our New England people—a change which has occurred principally within the last two or three generations. The nervous temperament with all its advantages and disadvantages is becoming too predominant for other parts of the body. The frame-work of the body generally is not so large ... the countenance is paler, the features are more pointed and not so expressive of health. We have a larger class of diseases arising from general debility ... we have more disease of the brain and nervous system, more sudden deaths from apoplexy, paralysis, and also diseases of the heart. In sound healthy stock we have in a far higher degree the recuperative powers of nature; while the original constitution is feeble, diseases of almost every kind become complicated, and their treatment more difficult as well as doubtful in result.”
Laws of inheritance affect the moral as well as the physical and mental health of the nation. Their action is fatally legible in the public records of crime. Not that many criminals inherit the actual attributes of crime—brutality, cruelty, malignity, propensity to abnormal sexual practices—these develop through the interaction of external with internal forces—but the ordinary criminal is born deficient in the elemental qualities necessary to the establishment of the average moral nature.
From observations carried on in English prisons, it appears that in these days of careful school-board education 25 per cent. of prisoners can neither read nor write, and a certain number are quite incapable of receiving and benefiting by school instruction. “The memory and reasoning powers are so utterly feeble that attempts to school them is a waste of time.” (Crime and its Causes, William Douglas Morrison, of H.M. Prison, Wandsworth, p. 195.) Intellectually, criminals are “unquestionably less gifted than the rest of the community”; emotionally they “have the family sentiment only feebly developed,” and morally the will is “morbidly variable.” A prisoner may be animated by good resolutions, anxious to do what is right, often possessing a sense of moral responsibility, yet may plunge again and again into crime from the absence of a sustained power of volition. “Persons afflicted in this way are generally convicted for crimes of violence, such as assault, manslaughter, murder. They experience real sentiments of remorse, but neither remorse nor penitence enables them to grapple with their evil star. The will is stricken with disease, and the man is dashed hither and thither a helpless wreck on the sea of life.”
The harmony of the social organism depends upon congruity of thought and feeling in its members and upon action made promptly conformable through exercise of the power of control centred in the inner part or spiritual nature of man.